[Being an excerpt from the book: ‘FIRELIGHT CRUMBLED’ : Tomas Lurgsy and the Bulgarian Farm Poets Movement: An Experiment in Poetical Criticism, by J T MARSDEN. Reprinted with the author and publishers’ permission].
Introduction
When I was first asked to write a book about the Bulgarian Farm Poets Movement, I must admit that I panicked. I loved the subject, undoubtedly, but I couldn’t for the life of me imagine how one would begin to interpret it in an original manner. The scene was all set for a cynical expose; a clinical deconstruction of those malodorous ironies that have always scurried like rats beneath the floorboards of the BFPM. You must know the script by now. So none of the so-called ‘farm poets’ actually came from the country. So they were all well educated. So none of them were particularly poor. So they were useless farmers.[1] So their attempts to create poetry for the common man were a failure. So the entire movement was a bit of a sham. The scene was set for this story to be told. And it would probably read well; all but a pocketful of sentimental Bulgarians refusing to accept its myriad truisms.
But what kind of a story is it? Not one that I’m especially interested in, I must admit. I gave up pulling sensation’s tail in my twenties. The thrill of making the academic world squeal like pigs has long since lost its attraction for me. My bottom drawer of review slips has plenty enough ‘polemical’s for the meantime. But then I don’t pat heads either. So while I wasn’t prepared to argue that the BFPM was a charade; neither was I going to write it a belated love letter, extolling the particular quality of genius that hung like the stench of silage about those Bulgarian cowsheds in the mid 1960s. I wasn’t going to try and cement the poets’ place alongside Boris Yashmilye as satirical masters of Bulgarian prose, arguing that through accepting socialism with so much apparent gusto they were in fact obliquely satirising it. No. It would read as well as its disparaging rival – it might even brush by the precious idol of the truth once or twice – but what would it achieve in the long run? Unless a work is commissioned by family of friends (in which case you have little choice) a critic has no excuse for eulogising his or her subject. It’s so uncouth. What’s more, one doesn’t like to re-ignite fires which were never properly lit in the first place. For all its publicity, the BFPM was very much a movement of its time: a local faction whose fame spread as far across Europe as a small knob of butter across a French loaf. Their poetry was good – but was it great?
Another problem with work of this sort is, once one has decided upon an attitude, how does one goes about applying that attitude to a structure? The greatest challenge is movement: proceeding from one point to another without one’s critical trousers falling down. A certain amount of grace is of course required. And yet on this occasion I wished to circumvent all the dusty devices; guaranteed to provide a safety net, perhaps, but almost as likely to deny the sparks of stimulating debate. Above all, I wished to avoid the clickety-track of the historical train-track. You know the game: in May this happened, in June that occurred, in August things changed a little. A story that starts at the beginning and finishes at the end – is there anything more tedious?
So I opted instead for a more scattershot approach. Rather than be directed by biographical instances, I decided to let the poetry itself take charge of the speeding train. Unarmed with the armour of conventional structure, I entered the timeless sphere of the pure text. Arranging all of my materials in a single room – that is, photocopying every single BFPM poem and laying them out on the floor or pinning them to the walls – I began a journey guided by words. Picking one poem at random, I started reading. By the fourth line of this poem I felt compelled to move to another poem, to pick up a point which had just occurred to me. At the fourth line of that poem I was obliged to move again, filling in the appropriate details as I went along. In such a manner did I proceed, until every line of every poem had been dealt with, not necessarily in order, but certainly in substance.
The methodology was designed to fit the field of study – and so it did. The Bulgarian Farm Poets Movement was ostensibly about simple living; about re-engaging with the natural world and the wants of unpretentious personages. The members of the movement were, however, too educated to fling off their education so easily. As a result their poems were far more complex than they would have liked them to be, swimming in ideas and references far beyond the natural comprehension of the ordinary man. So though the subject of their poems were indeed inspired by their self-opposed work as farmers, their approach was almost always that of the academic, albeit one tempered by a somewhat confused desire to evade conventional inter-textual practices. The results were often bewildering – a state of commotion which my carefully chaotic line of attack both mimics and, in all hopefulness, illuminates.
Part One: (The Only Part)
Like Maso’s mud
drawn from the throat’s pit
The Adriatic Swamp
washed through feet
Here we have the first four lines of Tomas Lurgsy’s fifty-two line poem, ‘Roses on the Threshold’ – one of the indubitable pinnacles of his short career. The poem starts in typical Lurgsy mode – mid-sentence: the readers finding themselves standing at the centre of a pool, without knowing how the hell they might have got there. For the clues, such as they are, are not easily understood.
For a start, who is this Maso that appears in the opening line? It would seem that the reference is to the seventeenth century Hungarian writer of fairytales, who is said to have coughed up mud shortly before his death in 1641 (though others claim that it was an early form of hot chocolate, poisoned by a jealous rival). This would account for the first two lines; though for the next two we have to go to another writer; the twentieth century Bulgarian novelist Andrey Makakarov, whose 1946 novella ‘Gained Losses’ was narrated by a young socialist fond of explaining social injustices through a peculiar range of statistics. In the first chapter he introduces the idea that if all the mud that clung to the feet of Bulgarian peasants in an average month was collected and thrown into the Adriatic, said sea would become a swamp overnight: ‘The Adriatic swamp/washed through feet’.
By referring both Maso and Makakarov, Lurgsy establishes himself within a long tradition, spanning several centuries. It also allows him to engage, even at this early point, with the relationship between socialism and idealism: Maso wrote fairytales that reflected reality; Makakarov attempted to write about reality, but ended up with fairytales. The tension between these two visions is hinted at here – in what is, in fact, one of a few references to Makakarov’s fiction to appear in BFPM poetry. Another of these can be found halfway through Willem Drövka’s piece ‘The Leaf Was Not Golden’, which owes an obvious stylistic debt to his friend Lurgsy:
crunched a secret carrot
knowingly alone
heavily breathing, dreaming
of scythe-based murders
The object of the allusion is again the hero of Makakarov’s ‘Gained Losses’ who, at the climax of the story, breaks down at a political meeting and starts frothing at the mouth (a little like Maso himself, except that no mud is released, merely physically excited saliva). As he writhes about on the cold stone floor, no doubt breathing heavily, he is taken back to a childhood memory, or trauma, involving some sort of carrot/scythe-based abuse. The incident is deliberately enigmatic in its original context, but Drövka, having made clear his desire to link his work with Makakarov’s, tries to put a new spin on it, inverting any circuitous suggestions of oblique sexual frustration into a charming vision of fecundity:
above where a bird sat
ochre beak signified
branches extending upwards
trees inviting bees, arrived
with a stream
of
aroused sound
The mention of bees invariably turns our attentions to the work of BFPM satellite, Ivan Basiuk. Originally uninterested in poetry, Basiuk took up Lurgsy’s offer to join him at his farm to lend him his agricultural knowledge (which, upon arriving there, turned out to be much less comprehensive than Lurgsy had thought it was). Having once stated that he would not be tempted into writing unless he lost both of his legs, Basiuk’s first experiments in verse began in not dissimilar circumstances. Trying to launch a colony of bees at Lurgsy’s farm, the bullish Basiuk was later to regret his decision not to wear any protective clothing. Though he certainly never lost his legs, the volume of bee stings he duly received provided him with the appropriate crippling sentence required to force him into penning the odd poem or two. Unsurprisingly, most of these dealt with bee orientated aggravation, the best example of which would have to be his undoubted masterpiece ‘Pollen Bottomed Bastards’, from which I take these fives lines:
The eternal drone of these
Flying Boiled Sweets
Is Oh-So-Sour
To me
The unexplainable capitalisation in the second line is entirely typical of Basiuk’s individual style (which can, at times, veer towards the purely clumsy). However, the delicate use of spacing between the third and fourth lines is something he probably learnt from Lurgsy himself, who utilises it to great effect in his long poem, ‘Rage Against the Stream’:
Where the frog played with the fish eye
Found amongst the shivering grass reflected
Where the dreams were ever so
Reflecting
The last things seen.
That Basiuk should be using Lurgsian methods so freely and unashamedly is hardly a matter for discussion. Lurgsy was, after all, the unofficial leader of the BFPM. Anything he did, his friends were likely to reproduce soon afterwards. He was the pacemaker, the engine, the catalyst of the group. Without him, the Bulgarian Farm Poets Movement would never have existed. But the relationship was not all one way: sometimes he did learn from his friends. Basiuk’s bee poem, for instance, was written in 1961. And yet in 1963 we find Lurgsy writing about flowers like so:
I stuffed my mouth with flowers,
licking nettles tenderly
Beyond the bridge, a buffet
of flavours fell
beneath my gaze
Sliced potato petals, settled in the pan besides
a herbal handful: stamen candles, stalks of
sweet marzipan and
boiled Apidana pills
This is one of the more easily understandable passages of Lurgsy’s poetry: a rather straightforward section of verse dealing with the poet’s dangerous and ultimately life-threatening addiction to the consumption of flowers. The last line is, however, more interesting. ‘Apidana’ refers to another plant, the colours of whose flowers are reminiscent of bees (from ‘Apidae’ – the name of superfamily to which bees belong). As such, ‘boiled Apidana pills’ would seem to be expressing a very similar thought to that of Basiuk’s when he described bees as ‘Flying Boiled Sweets’ – although in this case it refers specifically to the plant rather than the insect. What it does prove, yet, is that Lurgsy (contrary to popular opinion) did actually read his companion’s work. In light of this, the theory that he thought poets should never read any other poetry excepting their own would seem to be erroneous. In fact, I believe that this argument was never relevant, being no more than an immature over-reaction to Ludomir Birovnik’s seemingly symbolic poem, ‘The Pig and Poetry’:
round bellied pig
he
would rather read the
pattern in the dirt
or dung
heap
Thought for a long time to be expressing Birovnik’s frustration at Lurgsy’s refusal to read his poems, it now seems much more likely that the subject of this poem is actually what it purports to be: a poet reflecting on a real pigs inability to take any interest in rhyming patterns and pentameter. For whilst it is true that the poem was written at the same time Lurgsy was suffering from chronic obesity (thus the ‘round belly’) it would not seem to be in Birovnik’s character to veil his emotions so.[2] Indeed, as we see from his other verse (in this case, ‘Rabbit Run’) he rarely dresses up his complaints:
The farmer from Varna
s’hydrant-dripping-nose was firstly
leaking honey-sweet
until he said a word to me
and pleasingly
I turned it into blood
This, as it turns out, is an archetypal late-Birovnik poem, from his red period, complete with semi-Messianic references (allusions to water into wine) and his own quaint reactions to rhyming schemes. Note how the nearly annoying ‘a’s in ‘farmer from Varna’ are saved by the momentum of ‘e’s (leaking, sweet, me, pleasingly) building up to the deliberately anticlimactic double ‘o’ of ‘blood’. This is Birovnik at his best, somewhat released from an earlier fashion for pseudo-Surrealist precedents, is echoed in the way that the ‘heap’ from the above excerpt from ‘The Pig and Poetry’ turns out to be spliced from the ‘he’ of the second line and the first two letters of the fourth (‘pa’: he-pa = he-ap). Though this is neither juvenile nor maladroit, it is somewhat pointless; indisputably crossing the line drawn by Lurgsy when he stated in 1966 that ‘experimentation in poetry must be playful, otherwise it serves no purpose whatsoever’. Of course, that’s not to say that Lurgsy doesn’t cross his own line on occasion – though on the whole he maintains a refreshingly casual approach to these devices. I am inevitably reminded of the poem from which I took this the title of this study: ‘The Firelight Crumbles’. Again, we take four lines:
The firelight
crumbles
pie-in-the-sky troubles
multiply
End of Excerpt.
Further Reading:
Georgy Riecke reviews the book.
